A review of “The August Uprising, 1924” by Eric Lee
An earlier book by Lee, “The Experiment” (2017), described, comprehensively and fairly, something unique in Eastern European history: the successful establishment of an independent Georgia, governed on the basis of democratic socialism, from 1918-1921 when it was brutally subjugated by the Bolshevik forces of revolutionary Russia. Now he revisits this place and period to examine the short-lived but consequential uprising against Communist control of Georgia in the summer of 1924.
It is an astonishing story in so many respects. The uprising was known in advance by the secret police, it started a day earlier than intended, it lasted mere days, it was very quickly suppressed, and it achieved very little internally beyond many deaths of the supporters of democratic socialism. Yet, Lee skilfully uses this ‘small’ event as a prism to shed light on major, contemporaneous shifts in the European balance between totalitarian communism and democratic socialism, a disruption in political tectonic plates that reverberates through to today when Russia and Ukraine present such different visions of how society should be run and other European powers have to decide whether and how to become involved.
So Lee’s fascinating work is a wide and deep look at early 20th century socialist history, starting with the so-called October revolution (which he prefers to call – more accurately – the coup d’etat of November 1917) through to the founding meeting of the Socialist International in 1951. The book is meticulously researched and clearly written with a honest assessment of different versions of certain events and an admission about what is still not clear on key features of the uprising.
We inevitably ponder. Why did the uprising take place at all when it was, so obviously, doomed to fail? Why did the Soviet leadership react so prominently to such a seemingly minor event? And how many actually died in the uprising? Lee offers his answers but the death roll is the subject of estimates varying from 320 to 12,578, both equally improbable. What is certain is – in Lee’s words – “That uprising, which was quickly and bloodily suppressed, would be just a footnote in history but for one thing: it provided the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, leading to the final split between the world’s Socialist and Communist parties.”